Category: loss

the start of your ending. (let shit burn, part iv: the finale, hopefully)

September 17th, 2025

_{we do damage to limbs
in ’91, stompin’ you out with black Timbs
Prodigy and the H-A-V-O-C, from the Q.B.C
puttin’ cowards where they supposed to be
if I don’t know your face, then don’t come close to me
i got too much beef for that drama in the third degree}

I didn’t want to eulogize this one. I didn’t want to dig a grave. Because when I do this, God listens. She’ll kill it. Even as I do my best to resurrect it, it never truly comes back. Zombiefied, sure. But not living, not breathing, not viable. It’s this constant lesson to be learned: you can’t resurrect man – and his moments, journeys, escapes – like I do. I save and you don’t. So every time you try to bring this back, it will never work out in the ways you hope.

This series is four parts. Clearly, I’ve tried.

Resurrecting dead love – or their ghosts – is not my ministry.

Recently, I heard a sermon about relationships being seasonal. An ending because it was time for you to let go and let them find God. I can only carry someone so far until it’s time for them to learn how to walk on their own. Carrying a loved one doesn’t apply here but learning that it’s time to let go does. I can’t keep up with how I feel, how I’m moving and what I hope this could be.

Free therapy comes at a cost.

If you asked me how this started, I couldn’t tell you. We found ourselves to be in each other’s orbit. Mutuals, virtual mostly. We just built a bond, I guess. Then the pandemic hits and you find yourself leaning into people you never thought were sturdy enough to handle it. Then promises go empty, care goes unnoticed. You think you’re being too strong but in the realizations, you figure out that one of their weaknesses is that they can’t take what you give. You know it yourself. People get too close and you start to build distance. Care feels like an invasion of privacy. Struggles are burdens. Maybe that’s what brought you two closer.

Again, free therapy ain’t cheap.

Recently I’ve felt like I did my duty. That it was time to cross over the river and into the land of giving a fuck about myself. I realized that I hyperfixate on the nuances of relationships because it takes away from looking inward.

Writing this ain’t just about deading what this is. It’s about putting how I feel to rest.

How I look at this is what I’ve said in writings past: this was all about validating my existence as a person. This was the popular boy in high school and the quiet, nerdy girl holding on for dear life hoping for one glance in the hallway just so she could be delusional for the rest of her week. So she could call her BFF after school with a story to tell. Only for her friend to tell her to “get the f*ck over it.” Not because she’s mean but because she’s right. Flints and steel start flames.

Because she saw me – and I saw me – living a life without a care in the world and knew I was happy. I was. God saw it too because the sermon about leaving a ministry I wasn’t called for happened soon after. And I listened.

Let me give the people what I – and God – want.

To be freed from the “what ifs” and the “that could mean something.” To experience what you thought all this was in real time and be able to actualize it all. To see it and not just imagine.

Freedom is real.
june eleventh.

June 12th, 2025

I hate what I do for a living. I’ve had that feeling for quite some time but today really drilled that in. It’s monotonous and I sit all day. I feel like I’m wasting time.

Retail remixed. I don’t know if I ever had the temperament to deal with people in the ways I’ve conned myself into believing. The customers can be a lot. I was warned about that but I thought my decade-plus of working in every damn store in the mall prepared me for such theatrics. I was way wrong. You get talked to and tried in ways that only class-privilege and good ole Western Pennsylvania racism can produce.

It also exposes how much I don’t advocate for myself. How it’s easier to take disrespect than address it. Silence is complicity and in a lot of ways, I’m willing to be uncomfortable if it keeps everyone else’s peace. You don’t move up in the retail industry without the customer always being right, especially at the expense of yourselves.

I’d rather be angry than sift through what makes me that way.

I’ve known this about me for a long time. I sometimes think I can’t work through this perpetual feeling of discomfort. I came home, stewed, ordered takeout I know I couldn’t afford and napped. My dreams were a reflection of all that plague me. Woke up, ate the rest of that takeout I really couldn’t afford, sat in silence, strolled through an Instagram full of content that really makes me hate my life and went back to sleep.

But sadly, this type of agitation is more comforting than the work of getting out of this hell.

I really want to get out of this fiery pit of sadness, career numbness and creative suppression. My life can’t continue to be lived like this. I’m literally living for myself so I don’t have any excuse.

I don’t have these responsibilities. No aging parents to worry about. No little humans to raise into bigger ones. I’m unburdened and unencumbered. Yet, I’m miserable. Not because both of my parents are dead or because I’ve yet to become a mother but rather that I have no one to blame but myself for where I am in life. Sometimes you wish you could put your situation — and life decisions — on taking care of parents who keep trudging on with living or children who need food or a roof over their head to survive. The so-called ultimate sacrifice.

I could literally do whatever the f*** I want and with no strings attached.

But I’m not. Because confronting the myriad of emotions I carry does nothing but shut me down. It’s exhausting. I wish I could tackle all my worries one at a time but, like, I’m Ciara. I’m pissed that I don’t have it all together to the point that my worries are legit figments of my imagination.

I want to say I’m overwhelmed by life but I’m not sure that I’m using the right word. The conflicts and confusion I face are things I can actually control. If I say something, if I ask the right questions, if I acknowledge that I need help, if I learn how to say “no”. If I understand how to better manage my time. I come home and try to counter the day I felt I wasted earlier by doing “my own thing” but that means zoning out to anything that allows my brain to fully shut down. I can’t get anything done even if I had all the intention in the world. Simple things.

I no longer say that I don’t want to be alive but I cozied up to a lifestyle that’s slowly killing me. Its cousin, perhaps.

A part of me believes that if I had a life outside of work, if I found some purpose outside of those eight hours of the day that I could counteract a lot – if not all – of what I feel. Truthfully, if I did, it would make me stick around in something that I know is temporary. Create a false sense of security. Complacency.

I don’t appreciate the irony in that I’m feeling stagnant either way. And even in the discomfort of it all? I’m not sure if I have the energy to leave it all behind.
unhoused (unfinished.)

April 13th, 2025

I’m watching someone I love walk slowly into homelessness. It’s having me face a part of my past that I thought I washed away but truthfully lives in every thought and decision I make. It’s why I don’t own a television. Why I slept on a futon for years and why dressers don’t hold my clothes. I won’t ever throw away the suitcase I’ve owned since high school because it can carry enough wares to cover my body for a week and the framed photograph of my parents. Not too heavy, can be stowed under a bus or above my head on a train.

You carry only what you can. How fast can you clean up a room or apartment space? How quickly can you move? I’m not putting a television out on the side of a road for trash pick-up. Done that before. It’s a painful reminder of losing a home. Homes of childhood and ones I will never again call ‘home’ because the grief became too much.

Folks have a hard time believing that I’ve once been unhoused and transient. I know why. I’ve heard why. I come off too responsible. I don’t speak back to the voices only I hear inside of my mind. I don’t smell of alcohol. All of these belabored stereotypes of what people think the unhoused to be. It was none of those things that led me into a season without a home even though I think those around me would feel better to know that they helped someone struggling with ailments that are visible. It was pride. I didn’t want to let my family and friends know that I was on the last beyond my last.

Because Ciara is, somehow, not supposed to end up like that.

I’ve talked in therapy about other people’s expectations of me. I remember my Aunt telling me that she “never had to worry” about me because “Ciara is always going to be okay.” She’s going to find a job, she’s going to take care of herself. Truth is that I did those things not just to take care of myself but to prove to others that I was worthy to be worried about. You don’t want to help someone who isn’t trying to help themselves. But I also come from genes that know how to survive. Cut from “kill or be killed.” My mother was homeless for decades when she didn’t have to be. Shelters by night, museums and the library by day. Come hell or high water, we’re making it to the morning.

I wish I could transmute that into something positive.

Being here is a result of community; of people who came looking for me when I didn’t show up to church two Sundays in a row. Those who put out a call for spare rooms to hold me until I could get on my feet. For friends of my father who allowed me to sway aimlessly for a week before I could return back to Pittsburgh. The twenty dollars in my account that paid for my bus ticket. The sweet souls who didn’t let me pay rent even as I blew all of what I had because survival for me doesn’t teach responsibility. A God who continues to intercede on my behalf.

You grow tired of telling that story though. All of your life isn’t about the downs; there has to be a few ups. Has to be. So I stopped. I’m not all of the trauma and circumstances that plagued me. I changed my phone number last year because I wanted to rid myself of the burner phone that someone gifted me when I first got here. Doing that cut off contact with all of the people who helped me. Running from my past has consequences.
normalcy is a myth.

April 10th, 2025

I keep looking at a wedding photograph of my parents. Both of them are gone. “Gone” is a more gentle word to use. I usually say that they’re “dead”. My Dad died in 2012 and my mother left me last year. Both died alone. My Dad in a hospital bed, my Mom in a small room she rented in the suburbs of Washington, DC. Both times I couldn’t bear to see them in their last moments. I left my Dad’s side right before I got the call that he passed on. I was barely awake when the police rang my phone to tell me that my Mom’s landlord found her laid out on the floor. I was supposed to go down to put eyes on her but the fear of asking for help with doing such a thing kept me from going. She wasn’t answering her phone all week. My Dad first lost his voice and then his coherency days later because his kidneys slowly began to disconnect from his main frame.

Painful and lonely. That’s how they both went out.

I live that in the present tense. I feel that in my bones. My life is an inevitable disaster. I keep fighting my fate.

I woke up last night feeling like I just can’t get past the things that trouble me. Like there’s this invisible wall — brick by-fucking-brick — in my way that’s blocking me from taking one or — by the grace of God — two steps forward. That wall has a name: advocate. It went from “you need to learn how to take care of yourself” to “you need to learn how to advocate for yourself” to just simply that one word. The subtitles? “Be your biggest cheerleader” or the even more grating “you’re nobody’s bitch”. Don’t let anyone walk all over you or make you think you don’t matter.

Charge those thoughts to feeling invisible. Think about how they manifest into you being lonely.

I write about the same things a lot. I don’t really get pushed out of my comfort zone. I talk about losing my parents and the fear of an already lost self plenty of times. Another show of how cozy and comfortable the reality of chaos can be. I guess I can let others in on my fears beyond just dying alone.

It’s losing my mind. I’ve been dealing with acute memory loss. I can barely put full sentences together. I repeat myself a lot. It takes me longer to understand concepts and ideas. Thoughts jumble. I often think – and then know – that I’m saying the wrong things. My reaction time to others is slower than it used to be. People close to me believe it to be stress. It’s beyond that. When I say that something’s wrong, I’m often dismissed. My grandmother was “sharp as a tack” until her late eighties so I know I come from good stock. But my Mom was diagnosed with schizophrenia in her late forties so I’m aware of the ghost in the corner that haunts me day in and day out.

I’m in a season where I want empathy and not solutions but no one seems to have the time or patience.

I’ve never been normal. I’ve always felt weird. Off. Right of center. I know who I am destined to be: like my Mother. There’s this voice inside of this body telling me to fight to fuck away from that fate. You’ve seen what happens when you don’t take care of yourself. You die alone. In a hospital bed or a spare bedroom. It doesn’t have to go down like that.

Every day I just know I’m running away from that pitiful and lonely “inevitable disaster”. Can’t tell me it ain’t a curse.
(sometimes) the wilderness is a choice.

February 17th, 2025

I don’t like knock-out, drag-out fights with God. I really don’t. At one point, that was all that I knew. I knew it before I even knew who I was in the eyes of Her. When my body no longer belonged to me but to what felt like every man up and down the northeastern corridor; these moments when I gave in to the world to inexplicably escape from the world. We fought when I no longer wanted to be a part of that world but for some reason She wouldn’t let me out of my own misery. The battle continued when I clawed out toward the exit but She called me back inside. Fists thrown when I pleaded for something different but She forced me to just be still with the same.

She knew the fight wasn’t real. I loved it there. I wasn’t leaving. I loved fighting for my life. I loved living for the next day. I loved not knowing where my next meal was coming from or when this pain was going away. I enjoyed living in a rotting space with an even more rotten body and mind. This walk I started with Her and Jesus? That was to keep people off my back just enough that they wouldn’t suspect that I wanted so desperately to fall the fuck apart. God broke through me but then I doubted if my breakthrough was sincere. I didn’t want better. I wanted to wallow in my own shit. Better wasn’t that. When I got glimpses of life outside of my pain, I met that desire with a pain from not thinking I was worthy or good enough or earned a life better than what I was living.

That’s the wilderness. It’s a place set up solely for survival and nothing more. Nourishment is scarce, the beasts snarling with a desire to rip you into shreds are not. That speck of white something-ness you see isn’t a light at the end of a tunnel but rather a figment of your malnourished imagination. You give into anything that provides a sliver of escape. You can’t see shit, don’t know shit. Everything you thought you knew about yourself all turns out to be a lie. You don’t trust the solutions given or the people handing them to you. Everyone is the enemy and the reason that you may not ever get out. There’s a cost to making the wrong decision: you will never leave. You don’t get out until you’re ready to or are called to be.

But I loved it. A kink, perhaps.

There’s a comfort in the wilderness for me. That’s why I would gladly turn around and walk back into the trees every chance that I could. That season is worth more than what I know could be a lifetime of better things. Better isn’t comfortable to me. Better causes me to have to work on myself, to confront the things that hold me back. To atone for the hurt I’ve done to myself and others. To acknowledge that I have a pulse. Because when you’re alive, you have to answer for it all. To who you are and why you do the things that you do.

I had to acknowledge this inescapable feeling of invisibility. That no one cares about me. That if I disappear, the world wouldn’t think twice about my absence. I could die alone in my apartment and no one would notice I was missing. Asking for the stench of my rotting flesh to be the signal to announce my departure. That’s the Ciara way of going out, it felt like. That’s what should’ve happened to my Mom but because her children cared enough to do a wellness check and to go see if she was okay, she didn’t go out like her kids feared she would and one of her children – me– also thought would be her own inevitable. Somebody cared.

That was the moment when I realized that wilderness was a choice I could no longer make. The idea that no one cares is a fallacy, a lie that the enemy uses to keep me in place that God only calls to be a temporary refuge when life gets just a touch too rough.

But I like it rough. I joked to my Aunt that I have the “Roslyn Survival Gene.” Roslyn was my mother. I learned after her death that she was the sister you called when someone in the neighborhood needed their ass beat. You didn’t mess with her or the things she loved. Early in her life, those were the stray cats that roamed the streets near Chew Avenue. Some boy from their street thought it would be funny to string one of those cats up on a light pole. My mother tossed bleach in his face.

My mother also tried to beat my father’s face in with a broom handle. The schizophrenic delusions got the best of her that day. I asked one of her sisters if she could always tell that my Mom was “different”. It was an undeniable ‘yes.’ All I knew then was that my Mom did it because she thought he was “going to take us away from her.”

No one asked me how it felt to hear your father screams for help or to watch your own mother get arrested and taken out of the house in handcuffs. All I remember is that my Mom disappeared and then came back. And I had to walk around like that shit — that all of this shit — was par for the course. But then life got hard for her and I’m learning now that some of it was by choice.

She was homeless for years. Lived in shelters, trolled the streets of DC during the day when she needed something to do. Museums were her favorite pastime. Visiting one together was the last thing we did before she died. That woman was extremely curious about the world around her. I got that from her too. But after her passing, I came to peace with the fact that she didn’t have to live that way. She didn’t want help from her sisters or advice from her children. I lived in the guilt of not being able to help her my damn self. Her death, in ways, was a choice. To be found dead near the laundry room inside of the refurbished garage she lived in was a choice. A battered, bruised choice but a choice.

Me crying on my laundry floor after being laid off from my job was me surrendering to this idea that my life did not have to end the same way. That I wasn’t my mother’s child. That while I got that ‘survival by any means’ DNA from her, I also have the ‘I created you to thrive’ instincts from God and at some point, my flesh can no longer supersede my faith.

I loved the wilderness because it fed this falsehood that no one cared about me. I can disappear inside the forest and no one would know how to look for me. Because when people got too close to me, I’d push them away. It felt like an invasion of privacy, a seizure of my sacred space. I don’t get to almost forty years of life without someone giving a damn about my existence but in those early moments of life when someone could, they didn’t. So you think it’s normal to be left alone to figure it out. So when someone decides to walk alongside you as a helping hand or leans over to be a shoulder to cry on or is built to be the person to carry you in moments of weakness, you tell them to go elsewhere. Help feels uncomfortable. They then feel unwanted and leave.

If losing myself in the wilderness causes people to leave me alone, then it’s all worth it. But it leaves you lonely and always looking for new people to hopefully not treat you the same way. A fear of community or communion or friendship. I’ll sabotage this relationship first because I can’t make anyone have to go through the wrath of dealing with Ciara. She’s a fight you can’t win.

I waved the white flag that day towards God and no one else. “She doesn’t want to do this anymore? Bet. Then she doesn’t have to.” I think that’s all She ever wanted. She never dreamed for this place to be comfortable. She wanted me to know that in moments of discomfort, She will always make sure that I’m okay. Discomfort is not a place of permanence.

The wilderness isn’t fun and it’s not supposed to be.

Last year I finally gave up and She let me out.
being green. feeling blue. seeing red. yet hopeful.

October 24th, 2024

When these emotions first hit over the weekend, I heard that voice tell me to “sit with” my feelings. Actually wallow, let them wash over you in hopes to try to understand what’s about to happen. Wrestle with the discomfort, learn how to no longer accept what seems to be the normality of these moments. You don’t ever want to feel this way again in your life.

I haven’t experienced a lot in my life. In truth, that’s not true. My experiences are vast but because they are full of pain, trauma, hurt, heartbreak, struggle, setbacks and what feels like this eternal stain of sadness, I really don’t want them to count. There is true value in happiness, right? But I feel like I can’t escape the realities of what – up to this point – has been my life. Yet scared to change it because you don’t know nothing else but the life you swear you no longer want to live.

I told him that I’ve never been in a relationship. I’m floating in the regrets of telling him that. Just this constant reminder of what I haven’t been lucky to experience even if all of the men who could’ve been “Boyfriend #1” were in the terrible stages of their lives. But just to check off the box, it may have been worth it? The one I wanted to be the first and only was declared ‘fucked up’ from the start. But, hey … to be a girl with a story to tell, you know? I didn’t have those in high school and college but all of my best friends did. It’s insane the things you turn into markers of desirability and something-ness.

And then 2013 happened. Then 2017, 2018 and 2019. The moments when I learned that there are consequences to wanting so badly to be wanted in a moment where it felt like you had no other purpose than to be just that. Consequences that no one believes you could be facing because you’re “such a good girl” or, in one ear, call you “damaged goods” in a soft whisper while a man says sweet nothings to you in the other one.

I have to unlearn a lot of what I see in myself. Just afraid of being seen as if I’m not good enough. You deal with someone off and on for ten years because in your lowest moments, he knows just the right things to say to make you feel special. Like, you’re really that girl. But then he dogs you out every chance he can get. Or he never claims you.

These past four days reaffirmed a belief I have in myself: there is no one out here like me. I’m really a “one of one.” No one talks like I do, thinks how I do, sees the world like I do. I really am that girl full of signs and wonders — you don’t believe I’m possible until you see it for yourself.

For better or for worse.

The worst is how I feel. I didn’t want to send that text saying that I couldn’t do it but I knew I had to. I had to get out of my own way. I had to eliminate the inevitable before the pain got rid of me first. Call it a defense mechanism. He called me out for talking too tough. I’m scared, always. Even in the infancy of it all, he saw it up close.

I don’t want to feel this way ever again. I have to believe that I learned my lesson: when you live in fear of the unknown – when you live in a place of assumptions – you miss out on all of the good things. He would’ve been a really really good thing. I remember how I felt after our first phone call. My mind, body floated above the Earth and I didn’t want to find a safe place to land. Sensuality and intimacy became a tangible thing.

I told my Auntie about him. She knows absolutely nothing about my life outside of the glimpses of when everything went wrong. “You sound like you’re in a really good mood!” Life has been a challenge but those days on the phone and those texts back and forth felt way too easy – in a good way. Vapors were caught. I was happy to drown in them.

I’m mad at God. She knows I’m tight. I honor all emotions when it comes to Her. The book of Lamentations is one of my favorites in Scripture for a reason. God wants the “woe is me” moments even if you feel – or know – that you walked into them. Why let me experience that? I know God don’t carry a kink for watching me cry myself to sleep. My bedroom light just went on, natural light being at a premium. My homegirl told me to remember to give my grace.

Grace is great and I’m eternally grateful for a lot of things but the gracious thing would have been succumbing to the experience of what this would have been, even if the ending would have been the same. And walking away with lessons learned and a story to tell but only from place gratefulness and joy.

I’m writing this to lay it down and let it go so I can go on – alone. With the hopes that if I experience this again, that I don’t fold. Fold from being too green: scared.
forgiveness does not mean the absence of consequence.

May 19th, 2024

I sit here and wonder why I chose to forgive the men who hurt me. Why would I? I can count the number of men who’ve helped me on one hand. Those who harmed me? I don’t have enough appendages to note them all. I just know that I had to. Not for them but for me.

Every day I punish myself for believing that they deserve it.

I’m a woman that knows what it’s like to fester in what you’ve reaped. I stay reaping for things that I sowed by proxy of being present in those moments. I need to speak up about grace more often. The moment I believe that grace and forgiveness remain distant from me is when the cross loses its power. But I know that as I sit by watching their lives carry on as I labor on with the grief and shame of somehow letting their act of hatred stain me, I again wonder if forgiveness is truly the only method of solving this madness.

A man spoke death over me. A man threw a glass bottle toward my head. A man wouldn’t stop when my hands pressed against his body in hopes that he would. A man spit on me as I went down to the ground hoping things ould end. A man saw me unable to make cognizant decisions and thought the prospect of sex was worth more than asking if I was okay. A man mocked my father’s fragility during an online spat. “Your Dad was inside the house dying a slow death while you were over here sucking my dick.”

I have yet to forgive myself for running to men as my life ran away from me. Dude who spoke of my father’s “slow death” was one of those escapes. I prayed for his children when I found out he himself left Earth and went to the eternal. Forgiveness comes in many forms.

I’ve been taught through the words and actions of an eternal king that no one is without the opportunity for redemption. Powers drive a person to be their worst selves. Trauma informs. “I just want him to be okay.” That’s all I can ask for in those moments after I found myself on the wrong side of their history. They don’t ever mean to. Sounds like I’m making excuses.

I really do want their hearts to be at peace. I also want them to come to that conclusion before God chooses to no longer give them a way out.

“Their houses are full of deceit; they have become rich and powerful and have grown fat and sleek. Their evil deeds have no limit; they do not seek justice. They do not promote the case of the fatherless; they do not defend the just cause of the poor. Should I not punish them for this?”

I’m asking the Creator to spare them the worst knowing that they won’t be fully spared at all. “I won’t destroy you completely.” There’s always rebuilding after destruction.

I know I’m being spared. I know ducking and dodging the worst. Only after acknowledging my guilt. Sitting in shame, bathing in the disgust of my decisions. Punishing myself recklessly before God can finish the job. Sheepishly hoping as if you did enough self-work to keep God’s wrath at bay knowing there ain’t enough to stop the reign.

Sometimes exile is the catalyst for healing. Being sent outside of the city walls until your leprous spots no longer boil and fester is the only way to keep you and others safe. Destroy and rebuild. Uproot and plant. Remove and re-establish. Again, I know.

Yet I live in the shadows of all the hurt inflicted upon me. I don’t trust men. I don’t trust their intentions. I think most men will surely hurt me, it’s only a matter of time. I self-destruct under pure intentions. My ruins aren’t meant to be loved. I know perfect-for-me exists but I know a man won’t see me as perfect-for-them. I stay out of the way in hopes to not be into anyone’s way.

So I hide to heal. That’s the lie I tell myself.

I need to learn how to forgive myself.
if i don’t, i’ll continue to burn.

March 7th, 2024

I don’t want to be here and I don’t want to do this. Vent, emote, cry out, lay my emotions at the Creator’s feet. Acknowledge my anger and rage and internal torment and tyranny. Act like I have feelings, hold back whatever ills me for the safety of those around me. There isn’t anyone around me. Loneliness is a plague, a disease. Casted out from society, the leperous beast I have become. We’re just here and while I rather disappear, I have no choice but to announce my arrival into this space because God won’t let me do otherwise.

The way I feel is not good. The way I feel about where things are in my life is not great. There’s something about being in-tune with your wretchedness. I have these thoughts of wanting to be off of what feels like God’s grid because I don’t add anything of value to Her algorithm. What good do I do? What good can I do? What purpose do I serve? What meaning do I have? What point is my existence trying to prove? What is the point of anything exactly? What’s the why of it all?

God knows why and doesn’t tell me. I choose not to listen to Her right now because She’s going to tell me what I don’t want to hear: to just be here.

I’ve been thinking about what it means to matter in this world. I feel like the worst thing you can be as a Black woman is to be seen as unreliable. We’re always supposed to be there for somebody at the detriment of ourselves. That’s the badge you wear, the Easter pantsuit you get buried in when it’s all said and done. Caring about others – being seen as an asset to other’s lives – is the ultimate sign of your power and dominance. If no one needs you, then you really aren’t needed. To be needed is to have the power to make or break someone’s life. It’s an extension of God.

I don’t always want me around. I don’t always want to be needed around. I often see myself as a nuisance to be around. When others say that I’m needed, I truly believe that they are talking about someone else. Can’t be me. Why me? What did I do to deserve being seen as important? I’m just a bolt in the machine. If it gets lost, I doubt the machine will stop working. But then someone important will notice that it’s missing and ruse on about how they saved the machine from collapsing because they found something wrong. So even in my absence, I am wrong.

All of this feels wrong.

I’m arguing with myself about who I want to be when I grow up. To be a writer? I don’t know. I keep being told that it’s what I am supposed to do or that I’m running from my dreams. I don’t even know my dreams. I don’t even know what I want to do. Attaching capitalism to ill-faded dreams seems counter-intuitive. But I know that’s an excuse I use to keep myself from finding out that I’m not really that good at this thing called putting words to paper. That I’m fraudulent, that I’m a failure. I fight the urge to turn into one of those failed rappers from the nineties who think that any artist from their era is trash only for their hate to mask their envy and jealousy toward someone who had the balls to think they could make it.

I think that’s why I’ve been listening to It Was Written a lot. It’s Nasir Jones at twenty-one years old. Showed and telled on the previous album, his first, that he could be the next great thing. Comes on with his second album and people think he sold out, that he failed to live up to the mantle he didn’t ask for. But yet when you run it back almost two decades later, it’s arguably his best work. The storytelling and word play are elite.

In interviews, he’s so cool about it. So cool about himself, so sure of himself. He knows he’s the best to ever touch a mic but he’s still in survival mode so you can’t see him act high and mighty. When people come at the king, they usually don’t miss. I want to be that cool when it comes to sonning everybody in my way. Nonchalant about being the best, chill showing up and delivering. I ain’t that. I am a ball of nerves and fear and doubt. I lack resilience, I lack confidence. I could put out my It Was Written and everyone will feel that it’s wack.

But only to see the wisdom in it later. So, look, it had purpose and meaning and stature. It meant something. It had to be made.

I have something within me that has to be made. I just don’t know what.

So the purpose is to make something, is to be present. I talk about that a lot. I’m sure God is tired of me not delivering on my promise to just be around. I keep asking Her for something else and She won’t give it to me.
to be a writer is to have a f*cked-up life story [part one of infinity]

February 1st, 2024

I’ll never forget it. My Mom grabbed me from school. “We’re going to Philly to see your Grandma.” Excited isn’t the word to express how I felt at that moment. ‘Elated,’ maybe? ‘Overjoyed’. “Over the moon.” I loved Philly. It was the only place in the world where I felt like I belonged. All the little girls had plats with barrettes like me. The rottweilers were scary but the neighbors who owned them were not. Going to the corner store to buy cigarettes for my grandmother with a dollar in my hand for some sour worms and a red quarter-water. Water ice and cousins with even icier jokes and jabs for each other. Being the only Black girl in the neighborhood was tiresome. In Philly, the only tiredness I felt was from the endless sessions of double-dutch on days we’d sweat out our press just by standing outside too long.

She picked up my brother too. He was inside of the middle school just a field away. I remember munching down on some McDonalds as I sat across from my brother on a Northeast Regional train to 30th. I don’t remember the conversations had or the people around us. Or what the drive felt like. I don’t think you know feelings in third grade, not in a way that you can accurately describe them. If I was to think and think hard, then I’m sure that I couldn’t wait to get to McMahon Street to see everybody. The summer vacation came early, I guess.

I never thought about my Dad. I wonder how he felt coming home from work to see his wife’s car gone from the driveway. Walking into a house with no children, no son downstairs in the basement playing Street Fighter II and no daughter upstairs in the family room watching PBS. I’m sure he panicked. I know he felt his entire world shake under his feet. What I do remember is that my Mom called him from the ‘Big House’ and that he called back and she didn’t want to talk to him. When she finally did, I recall my Dad asking me if I wanted to stay. Then my brother left because he wanted to go home and I didn’t see my Dad for another six months. My Mom enrolled me into school and I started building whatever-a-life-could-be at eight years-old. A life of feeling like I didn’t belong, a life of feeling awkward and out-of-place. Felt like I was made fun of more than having fun itself. Sleeping on a pull-out couch bed with my Mom every night, missing the five-bedroom house surrounded by White folks who also made me feel like I didn’t have the right to be there.

Felt good to go back into that house after a while. Until my mother tried to beat my Dad’s brains in with a broomstick as he screamed for my brother to call the police. When they came, I walked into a bedroom with blood splattered across the carpet and a shattered lamp miraculously still plugged in and on from being tossed to the ground. How the police let a child walk into a room like that says how they felt about it all. I would turn around to see my Mom at the end of the hallway with handcuffs on her wrists. She smiled at me, “Mommy’s going to jail.” I wouldn’t see her for another six months.

Then she just showed up. I yelled out for her when I saw her at the 7-Eleven up the street. Then years would follow with court dates, visitations, restraining orders. I would visit my Mom on Wednesdays and every other weekend until college. Before I left for school, the electricity was cut off and my Mom and I ate Chinese food we’d have to hold onto until the weekend was out. My Dad couldn’t afford to pay alimony and my Mom antagonized him for it. One day we drove past the apartment complex where she lived to see my bedroom set on the corner. Back to the ‘Big House’ she went.
float.

January 12th, 2024

Float.

Float into your loneliness, Sis.

Drown.

It’s allowing you to see that you’re peering out toward a shore littered with the wrong things.

In the world, in people, in yourself.

Your existence isn’t an indictment.

The problem you have at this moment is that you simply just want to be tolerated by someone. Tolerance isn’t a pretty thing. It reeks of hoping to be put up with because, if left to their own devices, they would see all the wrong that exists within you. The world is full of people with idiosyncrasies, with things that make their own souls wretch. Give yourself some grace. The world is indeed full of others drowning in the sea of their own makings and happenings. Give them grace. It ain’t intentional.

What are you looking for in community? Was it ever about feeling safe? What is safety? Are you safe? Are you … you? What is it about this season that calls you to change everything about who you are? Are you running from the person you created in order to survive? Do you not like her because she isn’t cool enough or agreeable enough or wanted enough or desired enough? Or are you tired of living as a person who wore the make-up of her trauma for damn near a decade and forgot about what it would be to live through that drama but not stuck?

Through the waters, through the rivers, through the fires. Not stuck. Through.

You won’t drown nor be burned in this journey of renewed self-discovery. Living in the present, not living through your past. You aren’t just the girl dragged to a sleepy city by forces not then known – through the death and resurrection of the flesh-breathed body of your Creator. You weren’t just a girl trying to survive in places where it felt as if no one knew you. Where you regressed into a teenager trying to find her way through the hallways without being judged and picked on.

You’re thirty-six now. You were twenty-five then. Then thirty. Then thirty-three. You hit your so-called ‘Jesus year’ during a time when the entire world shut down. So did you. It gave you a moment to see what life would be like if you took care of self and got out of your own way. Then life picked back up. Knocked on your door like the reaper collected bodies for heaven’s newest class. Except it was hell and your body couldn’t handle it anymore. You finally crashed and burned.

You burned bridges. You left the pathways to the places that wanted so bad to be a refuge for you in dust and ruin. Never again will they give someone a chance.

Sis, you’re not that powerful. And grace was – and is – sufficient. They know you’re hurt.

Do you know you’re hurt? Is that why you’re seeking out acknowledgement in the places that you need a break from? The algorithm and timeline isn’t real. These parasocial relationships cannot save you. Only the Creator can save you by saving you from yourself. That’s why you need to disappear. You needed a reminder.

Feel the waves of your loneliness. They won’t last long.